Goddess (Starcrossed)

and not human at all. She remembered the sunlight hitting her face through the stained-glass window and figured out how he’d seen her. She knew who, or rather, what, she was dealing with now. Andy backed away quickly, her breath starting to rasp with real fear.
    “Are you going to run from me?” the youth asked poignantly, like this had happened to him many times before.
    “Would you chase me?” she asked, adding to her voice the seductive, hypnotic edge that could drive mortal men to their death. She needed to stall for time, maybe get him to follow her back to the path. There was sure to be someone up there to help her.
    “Of course I would,” he said, his eyes smoldering and his voice low. He was aroused, but not hypnotized—unfortunately for Andy. “Only the ones who run are worth catching.”
    Doesn’t it figure? she thought with that desperate hilarity that only happens in the most hopeless circumstances. I spend my whole life deathly afraid of tempting a boy, and I end up getting jumped by one at an all-girls’ school.
    The light sparked off him again, catching his edges and making him look more real than real, like he existed in 4-D. Andy knew this was no trick of the rising autumn sun. She also knew this was no boy. Her mother had warned her of the possibility of something like this, but Andy had never thought it would come to pass.
    “Hey, Andy!” called an intensely chipper girl Andy had met over a month ago at freshman orientation and avoided ever since. She eyed Andy and the boy uncertainly. The noisy cluster of girls behind her went silent when they saw that Andy was with a boy. “Are you coming to class?”
    “Hi . . . Susan!” Andy yelled back frantically, remembering the girl’s name at the last moment. “I want to go with you!”
    The beautiful youth smiled sadly at Andy as the chattering knot of young women moved closer to collect her. Then he turned and ran off toward Lake Waban.
    “Where did your friend go?” Susan asked, perplexed.
    “He’s not my friend,” Andy said, grasping at Susan’s mitten-covered hand with relief. “We need to go to campus security right now .”
     
    “I can describe him!” squealed a girl in Susan’s posse who had shiny black hair and cinnamon skin. She told the security guard, “He must have been freezing because he was only wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt!”
    “He had curly blond hair, and he was really tan. Like a Malibu surfer boy,” a chubby girl with stick-straight, blonde hair blurted out, like she couldn’t contain her exuberance.
    “He had really smooth skin, too. Like a dolphin!” tittered the cinnamon girl back to the blonde girl, and the two of them fell in a fit of snickers, drooling over Andy’s almost-rapist.
    Andy dropped her face into her hand and rubbed her eyes while she listened to more of the same from the rest of the witnesses—or “groupies” as she was beginning to think of them. She reminded herself that they couldn’t help their response. They were only human.
    After spending the next two hours with security, relating the entire experience, and walking the guards to the exact spot where she had been accosted, Andy had gratefully accepted a new fob for her key chain. She had an official stalker, one who had made it onto the campus, without a pass no less, and the guards were not about to let her wander around without taking a few precautions. The fob was a panic button that would bring them to her in an instant. If she even caught sight of the boy again, she was to summon them. Andy wondered if she would really press it and endanger them all, or if she would face him alone.
    Although Susan and her gaggle had stepped up and corroborated Andy’s story, they all did so with a touch of confusion. Andy had reported word for word what the boy had said to her, and any one of them would have given her eyeteeth to have the same things said to them by such a hottie.
    Andy couldn’t explain that this wasn’t romance. Men had always said things like that to her, but it had nothing to do with love. She went to all-girl Catholic schools her entire life and had run away from every man who’d pursued her, but that didn’t stop them from chasing. She’d run away from the girls who had pursued her, too, and there had been plenty of those. After that horrendous experience in seventh grade when her best friend had tried to kiss her in front of Sister Mary Francis’s history class, she’d never even allowed